Harlem

Harlem was built as a middle-class suburb in the decade after 1900, and its grandest apartment houses date from then: Graham Court, the Astor estate's full-block courtyard building on Seventh Avenue, and the Edgecombe Avenue houses on Sugar Hill, where 409 and 555 Edgecombe between them housed Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and Count Basie.

The condominium arrived with the rezoning of 125th Street and the boom of the 2000s: Fifth on the Park at Marcus Garvey Park, One Museum Mile at the top of Fifth Avenue, the Kalahari, the Lenox. Their deeds are a record of a neighbourhood whose prices doubled in a decade, and of who bought in.